Demonstrating the Power of Social Situations via a Simulated Prison Experiment

In 1971, a team of psychologists designed and executed an unusual experiment that used a mock
prison setting, with college students role-playing prisoners and guards to test the power of the
social situation to determine behavior. The research, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment,
has become a classic demonstration of situational power to influence individual attitudes, values
and behavior. So extreme, swift and unexpected were the transformations of character in many of
the participants that this study -- planned to last two-weeks -- had to be terminated by the sixth
day.

Findings

A person-centered analysis of human behavior attributes most behavior change, in positive or

negative directions, to internal, dispositional features of individuals. The factors commonly
believed to direct behavior are to be found in the operation of genes, temperament, personality
traits, personal pathologies and virtues. A situation-centered approach, in contrast, focuses on
factors external to the person, to the behavioral context in which individuals are functioning.
Although human behavior is almost always a function of the interaction of person and situation,
social psychologists have called attention to the attributional biases in much of psychology and
among the general public that overestimates the importance of dispositional factors while
underestimating situational factors. This "fundamental attribution error" they argue, leads to a
misrepresentation of both causal determinants and means for modifying undesirable behavior
patterns. Research by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, PhD, (1974; see also Blass, 1999) was
one of the earliest demonstrations of the extent to which a large sample of ordinary American
citizens could be led to blindly obey unjust authority in delivering extreme levels of shock to an
innocent "victim."

The Stanford Prison Experiment extended that analysis to demonstrate the surprisingly profound
impact of institutional forces on the behavior of normal, healthy participants. Philip Zimbardo,
PhD, and his research team of Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, David Jaffe, and ex convict consultant,
Carlo Prescott (Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1973) designed a study that separated the usual
dispositional factors among correctional personnel and prisoners from the situational factors that
characterize many prisons. They wanted to determine what prison-like settings bring out in people
that are not confounded by what people bring into prisons. They sought to discover to what
extent the violence and anti-social behaviors often found in prisons can be traced to the "bad
apples" that go into prisons or to the "bad barrels" (the prisons themselves) that can corrupt
behavior of even ordinary, good people.

The study was conducted this way: College students from all over the United States who answered
a city newspaper ad for participants in a study of prison life were personally interviewed, given a
battery of personality tests, and completed background surveys that enabled the researchers to
pre-select only those who were mentally and physically healthy, normal and well adjusted. They
were randomly assigned to role-play either prisoners or guards in the simulated prison setting
constructed in the basement of Stanford University's Psychology Department. The prison setting
was designed as functional simulation of the central features present in the psychology of
imprisonment (Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney, 1999). Read a full description of the methodology,
chronology of daily events and transformations of human character that were revealed.

The major results of the study can be summarized as: many of the normal, healthy mock prisoners
suffered such intense emotional stress reactions that they had to be released in a matter of days;
most of the other prisoners acted like zombies totally obeying the demeaning orders of the
guards; the distress of the prisoners was caused by their sense of powerlessness induced by the
guards who began acting in cruel, dehumanizing and even sadistic ways. The study was terminated
prematurely because it was getting out of control in the extent of degrading actions being
perpetrated by the guards against the prisoners - all of whom had been normal, healthy, ordinary
young college students less than a week before.

Significance

The Stanford Prison Experiment has become one of psychology's most dramatic illustrations of
how good people can be transformed into perpetrators of evil, and healthy people can begin to
experience pathological reactions - traceable to situational forces. Its messages have been carried
in many textbooks in the social sciences, in classroom lectures across many nations, and in popular
media renditions. Its web site has gotten over 15 million unique page views in the past four years,
and more than a million a week in the weeks following the expose of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners
by American Military Police army reservists in Abu Ghraib Prison.
Practical Application

The lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment have gone well beyond the classroom (Haney &
Zimbardo, 1998). Zimbardo was invited to give testimony to a Congressional Committee
investigating the causes of prison riots (Zimbardo, 1971), and to a Senate Judiciary Committee on
crime and prisons focused on detention of juveniles (Zimbardo, 1974). Its chair, Senator Birch
Bayh, prepared a new law for federal prisons requiring juveniles in pre-trial detention to be
housed separately from adult inmates (to prevent their being abused), based on the abuse
reported in the Stanford Prison Experiment of its juveniles in the pre-trial detention facility of the
Stanford jail.

A video documentary of the study, "Quiet Rage: the Stanford Prison Experiment," has been used
extensively by many agencies within the civilian and military criminal justice system, as well as in
shelters for abused women. It is also used to educate role-playing military interrogators in the
Navy SEAR program (SURVIVAL, EVASION, and RESISTANCE) on the potential dangers of abusing
their power against others who role-playing pretend spies and terrorists (Zimbardo, Personal
communication, fall, 2003, Annapolis Naval College psychology staff).

The eerily direct parallels between the sadistic acts perpetrator by the Stanford Prison Experiment
guard and the Abu Ghraib Prison guards, as well as the conclusions about situational forces
dominating dispositional aspects of the guards' abusive behavior have propelled this research into
the national dialogue. It is seen as a relevant contribution to understanding the multiple
situational causes of such aberrant behavior. The situational analysis of the Stanford Prison
Experiment redirects the search for blame from an exclusive focus on the character of an alleged
"few bad apples" to systemic abuses that were inherent in the "bad barrel" of that corrupting
prison environment.

Cited Research
Blass, T. (Ed.) ( 1999). Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Haney, C. & Zimbardo, P.G., (1998). The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy. Twenty-Five Years
After the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7, pp. 709-727.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper & Row.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1971). The power and pathology of imprisonment. Congressional Record. (Serial
No. 15, October 25, 1971). Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3, of the Committee on the
Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session on Corrections, Part II,
Prisons, Prison Reform and Prisoner's Rights: California. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing
Office.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1974). The detention and jailing of juveniles (Hearings before U. S. Senate
Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, 10, 11, 17,
September, 1973). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 141-161.

Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Jaffe, D. (1973, April 8). The mind is a formidable jailer:
A Pirandellian prison. The New York Times Magazine, Section 6, pp. 38, ff.

Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. (1999). Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment:
Genesis, transformations, consequences. In T. Blass (Ed.), Obedience to Authority: Current
Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. (pp. 193-237). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

American Psychological Association, June 8, 2004